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The World's First TV War
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18545 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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4 / 1991 |
2,912 Words |
| Author
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Ted Smith
Ted Smith is a professor of journalism at Virginia
Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. |
A favorite quotation of wartime journalists, endlessly repeated and paraphrased, is Sen. Hiram Johnson's 1917 lament that "the first casualty when a war comes is truth." Ironically, it now appears that the first casualty of the war against Iraq may well have been American journalism, maimed by a multitude of self-inflicted wounds.
Clearly, the conflict has elicited a maximum effort from the press, including two days of continuous coverage by CNN and network television, daily special sections (and even a few extra editions) in the larger newspapers, and the deployment of hundreds of journalists in the field. The result, thanks largely to the wonders of satellites, has been technologically awesome. But by most traditional standards of journalism, the quality of coverage has been appalling, especially on television.
Every beginning journalism student is taught that the first duty of a reporter is to provide accurate and reliable information. Yet coverage of the war with Iraq has been consistently, sometimes grossly, inaccurate. The most egregious errors occurred in the early stages of the conflict, when all major television outlets offered extensive live coverage. Faced with the necessity of somehow filling days of air time, but possessed of little or no reliable information about breaking events, television adopted the simple expedient of reporting whatever came to hand. The result was a chaotic jumble of rumors, speculations, and outright falsehoods, sometimes lasting for hours at a stretch.
On the first night of the war, for example, euphoria over the unexpectedly low losses in the first wave of attacks was followed by wildly optimistic estimates of the damage inflicted. By 11:30 P.M., CNN's Wolf Blitzer had reported the destruction of the Iraqi air force, 100 airfields, and the Republican Guards; by 2 A.M., several networks were discussing the advisability of a bombing "pause" to allow Saddam Hussein to surrender.
Coverage of the first Iraqi missile attacks the next night was even worse. On CBS, Dan Rather insisted categorically and repeatedly that at least one of the Scuds that landed in Israel had carried a chemical warhead and that Israeli forces were "retaliating" against Iraq. Meanwhile, ABC and NBC were both reporting the arrival of nerve gas victims in Tel Aviv hospitals. Coverage of the first Scud attack on Dhahran was less hysterical but equally confused. Within a period of eight minutes, NBC claimed that a Patriot had intercepted a Scud, CBS flatly denied the intercept, and CNN denied that a Patriot had even been launched.
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